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TGS announcements and gameplay, Chris Kohler on the history of the NES CD-ROM, Blake Hester spends three days in the woods with Psychonauts 2 backers and developers, Jess Joho on Marvel Spider-Mans use of MJ and the focus on heroism of the people behind the mask, Simon Parkin interviews Youtubers about burnout, Lewis White covers the making of the PS1 title Alien Resurrection, previews of Metro Exodus, Ed Smith on how Yakuza 0 is a satire of 80s excess, strafefox on the creation of Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past, Heather Alexandra's Metal Gear retrospective, Adam Millard on how games communicate, Danganronpa and Zero Escape creators form new studio, EA taken to court in Belgium for loot box sales, and more.

SEATTLE—We've already had a lot to say about the games we saw at last week's PAX West. Our coverage kicked off with an exclusive Valve studio visit and demo of its new card game Artifact, and we continued with looks at surprise '90s rebirths and Nintendo Switch offerings.

Criterion Games, a company best known as the creator of the explosive Burnout racing series, is making Firestorm, which in itself is better known as Battlefield V’s battle royale. The news comes from an EA announcement last night, which answers a lot of questions about the game’s new mode.

Dice has revealed all of the new War Stories coming to Battlefield V. There are five entries in the single-player anthology, a collection of shorter, character-focused episodes, rather than a single long campaign. The format debuted in Battlefield 1, and Dice is bringing it back for their new release. For the first time, one story comes from a German perspective.

The Battlefield V beta is raging right now and I can confirm: war is indeed hell. According to Dice, though, war is also full of some incredibly stunning vistas just begging to be screenshot. Handily, they’ve also allowed you to turn off almost all the UI (except that ‘BETA’ notice in the corner, and the fact you can’t holster your weapon), so I spent several matches documenting views and action alike as an amateur wartime photographer. I can only apologise to my teammates, but with the consolation that my aim is terrible so I wouldn’t have been much help anyway.

We still had a lot questions about Fallout 76 even after its extensive reveal at E3 this year. Some of those were mechanical: is it still going to feel like Fallout in multiplayer? Can players opt out of being nuked by their rivals? How is questing going to work without NPCs?

Dying Light: Bad Blood only needed ten minutes to prove it was more fun than most battle royale games. There are two standout reasons for this. First, the fact that you have to deal with ravenous zombies as well as online players while trying to survive eliminates the mid-game lull you might get in a Fortnite or PUBG match. Second, the accomplished parkour from the now three-year-old zombie smasher ensures that chases across the map are always dynamic and thrilling.

I have long said that there just aren’t enough games that allow me to live out my dream of being a person that can actually hold a tune. Luckily, musical adventure game Wandersong is here to save the day.

New Devil May Cry 5 Gameplay! We got to play a Devil May Cry 5 demo at Gamescom 2018, and then sat down with director Hideaki Itsuno and producer Matt Walker to chat about new features, old faces, and all the mechanics and features in between.

Fight through classic Black Ops locales while playing as some of your favorite characters from across the series. Drop into the action in a wing suit, and take command of land, sea and air vehicles in this last-player-standing experience celebrating the Black Ops series in an unprecedented way, all on the biggest map in Call of Duty® franchise history.

I've been saying for the past year that although Fortnite and PUBG are both popular battle royale games, the only thing that might take away PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' core audience is if another military-style battle royale game comes along with triple-A levels of polish and performance. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's new Blackout mode is that battle royale game.

When Activision announced that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 would have a battle royale mode, I was supremely skeptical. At best, it sounded like an attempt to jump on the bandwagon of an already popular genre; at worst, a last-minute attempt to flesh out a game without a traditional single-player campaign. But, after just a few rounds of play, it’s clear that the team is on to something special. This new take on the battle royale genre, called Blackout, is exceptional.

We previously got an introduction to the “Puppets” in Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk, and NIS America shared a new trailer that shows how you’ll make these soldiers before sending them off to dungeon crawl.

“95% of the game is characters talking to each other and solving problems”, says Call Of Cthulhu pressman Ben Barrett in this stream of its first hour. I didn’t expect to kick off Monday by wishing the real world was more like a Lovecraftian horror detective RPG, but here we are.

My first reaction to the Resident Evil 2 remake was one of awe. Not for the return of newbie police officer Leon Kennedy and his trusty right shoulder, there for us to once again – as in Resident Evil 4 – peer over as we take aim with his hand cannon. Nor was it the recreation of the PSOne game’s eerie Racoon City Police Department, the details of its lobby that were locked away in my memories as pixellated smears suddenly coming back to haunt me in full HD.

Sega announced a brand-new title by Ryu ga Gotoku Studio (Yakuza Studio) called Judge Eyes, and it’s been revealed as a courtroom thriller-themed action game that being called Project Judge in the West.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is juggling a lot. It flirts with comedy and tragedy, serves up the stealth that the series is known for, and overhauls and improves straightforward melee combat. Odyssey also doubles down on RPG elements in both combat and dialogue choice — in a year when everyone is wheezing about the death of single-player games.

I’m bloody nervous. There’s a tangled forest around me, wisps of fog rolling across its base, the treeline silhouetted by intense moonlight. Luminous green mushrooms pick out spots in the gloom, but with memories of my parents’ many warnings and an unfortunate hospital visit echoing through my head, I elect not to consume any of them. Some torches burn in the distance, the flames dancing across a series of tree houses, each interconnected by makeshift wooden bridges and precariously narrow poles. Whoever built them needed to stay off the ground for some reason. Y’know, the ground that I’m stood on.

Endless Space 2 players have a happy surprise today, with a free update bringing a whole host of new features to the strategic space opera. That includes new skins, new lore, and the official launch of AI modding. If you haven’t taken command yet, you’re still in luck, since the game is on sale at a steep discount in promotion of the launch.

Klein did not mince words. On Twitter, he referred to one thread as a “toxic landfill” and described angry League fans as “manbabies.” After some tweets attempting to explain that “‘sexism against men’ makes no sense,” and spelling out why sexism is defined by discrimination against a marginalized gender, Klein began receiving inflamed messages from League players over his comments. That strain of message fed into its own Reddit thread, which garnered over 3,800 comments, and into threads on KotakuInAction, a subreddit associated with GamerGate. Many commenters called for Riot to take action against Klein, who received a barrage of harassment over the weekend.

A Tencent employee has been suspended pending an investigation into allegations of misconduct on social media. Nick Zasowski, who was global community manager for the company’s MOBA, Arena of Valor, has been accused of sending unsolicited sexual images of himself to a number of women over social media.

Pearl Abyss, the Korea-based developer behind Black Desert Online, will purchase EVE Online publisher CCP Games, the companies announced today. CCP Games will “continue to operate independently,” according to a press release, as well as contributing its publishing and development experience to Pearl Abyss’ projects.

Carbine Studios, the developer of the massively multiplayer online game WildStar, is shutting down, Kotaku has learned. Fifty people will lose their jobs in the process, according to a person briefed on the shutdown. The game will also come to a close.

Every big video game publisher plans out their marketing announcements meticulously, juggling dozens of bureaucratic balls every time it’s time for a new trailer or press release. When something interrupts those plans—like, say, Nintendo postponing a planned Nintendo Direct—weird things can happen. Like three oddly delivered Switch announcements including Final Fantasy XV (Pocket Edition) and Civilization VI.

Capcom's fighting game personnel changed around fairly recently as the well known Yoshinori Ono has taken on a lesser job title while Ryozo Tsujimoto, best known now as the face (Producer) of Monster Hunter, has taken over.

It seems EA has decided not to comply with Belgian law regarding the sale of loot boxes in the country, and officials there are taking the company to court. A series of other major titles from Overwatch to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have restricted loot box purchases for players in Belgium, and EA is the last major player named by regulators yet to comply.

Mods for games are usually additive. New features, forgotten content… mods are usually about putting more into a game. Yet in recent years we’ve seen the rise of a particular kind of mod that takes things away. Specifically, taking away a game’s enemies or threats. We previously covered a mod which removed all danger from first-person sci-fi horror Soma—it later become an official game mode—but there are plenty more games out there getting mods that do the same and they’re equally fascinating.

With the 2018 Overwatch league in the rear view mirror, Blizzard has been assembling a larger deck for next year's season. With the hefty team fees of up to $60 million, it's a high-value slot, so various corporations interested in getting into eSports have been eager to field teams. Atlanta, Guangzhou, and Toronto were previously confirmed or just as good as confirmed, but now several other cities have been added to the bench.

One of League of Legends’ biggest stars will have a chance to earn his fifth championship title at this weekend’s North American summer finals—and possibly cement his legacy as the continent’s best player of all time.

Back in May, Philadelphia Fusion’s Overwatch Contenders team, Fusion University, ran into some wardrobe difficulties when their team jersey—emblazoned with a giant, devil-may-care “FU”—got banned from the season one finals. Now, though, they’re back with a new jersey that tells “FU” haters to F off.

Everyone knows the story of Rainbow Six Siege's troubled launch, and how Ubisoft managed to bring it back from the brink of failure to become one of the most successful games around. But what most people don't know is Siege's esports scene followed a similar path, with disaster striking at the first ever LAN event that was supposed to kickstart the competitive side of the game.

In response to the recent mass shooting tragedy in Jacksonville, during which two Madden competitors were killed and 11 more were injured by a fellow player, the annual SoCal Regionals fighting game tournament will enforce additional security measures in an effort to protect attendees. The most glaring policy is the event’s implementation of mandatory arcade stick checks, asking players to unscrew and open their peripherals for further inspection.

Nintendo never released a CD-ROM gaming system. But for a while in the early 1990s, it flirted with the idea. That protracted will-they-won’t-they romance produced pages of breathless gossip columns in video game magazines, a mountain of vaporware, some terrible Zelda games, and one priceless prototype.

hen Matt Lees became a full-time YouTuber, he felt as if he had won the lottery. As a young, ambitious writer, director and presenter, he was able to create low-budget, high-impact films that could reach a worldwide audience, in a way that would have been impossible without the blessing of television’s gatekeepers just a few years earlier. In February 2013, he had his first viral hit, an abridged version of Sony’s announcement of its PlayStation 4 video game console, dubbed with a cheerily acerbic commentary. Within days the video had been watched millions of times. “It hardly seems viral at all, by today’s standards,” Lees says, yet it was one of the most viewed videos on YouTube that month. The boost to Lees’ ego was nothing compared with the effect it had on his career. When YouTube’s algorithm notices this sort of success, it starts directing viewers to the uploader’s other videos, earning the channel more subscribers and, via the snippety advertisements that play before each one, higher income. Overnight, Lees had what seemed like the first shoots of a sustainable career.

Spider-Man features a big open world full of larger-than-life characters, but it’s the little details that really make that world feel special, like the way Spider-Man talks on his phone. As Spider-Man swings around New York, he’ll get phone calls from his friends, family and colleagues. During these little chats, his voice sounds appropriately strained. He grunts through his sentences as he leaps from web to web.

From a design point of view, the podcasts serve the same purpose that they do in most of our lives: killing time on your daily commute. Like any big open-world game, Spider-Man has moments when you’re doing little more than moving from point A to point B, clearing your map of those irresistible little icons that denote collectibles, photo ops, or crimes to stop. The game handles this material better than most of its collect-a-thon ilk, but that can’t stop the “gotta grab ’em all” tedium from occasionally setting in. Luckily, whenever enthusiasm flags, you have Jameson right there in your ear, screaming about masked vigilantes and whatever other random thoughts roam through his brush-topped head. It’s a great distraction from Spidey’s usual grind, even if the podcasts do annoyingly cut off the second you get close to a new bit of in-game content. And as a piece of evolution for a 55-year-old character, it’s practically sublime. Or, to put it another way: J. Jonah Jameson was always a born podcaster. He just didn’t know it.

I was immediately suspicious of the story. In a post-GamerGate world (assuming that we ARE post), taking any supposedly heartbroken male gamer at his word over something like this is rather naïve. Remember, GamerGate began its life as a harassment campaign thanks to a heavily workshopped blog post by Eron Gjoni falsely accusing his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Quinn, of various sins including sleeping with reviewers for good coverage of her game Depression Quest. It was a blatant and terrible act of control by a jilted man marketed to angry young male gamers. Schultz’s tale had a similar feeling.

One thing I noticed in coverage of the proposal story was that no one had apparently bothered to talk to Gamble about it. After a few minutes of research on Facebook, I reached out to her for her side of the story.

The 1980s, or at least, the Western mythos of the 1980s—the decade as I, a Briton born in 1990, and weaned on American movies, have learned to recognise it—can be summarily characterised by that Gordon Gekko quote from the original Wall Street: “Greed is good”. Pop-culturally, the ‘80s are an era of conspicuous consumption; in fact conspicuous everything. The cars have sharp lines. The phones are enormous. Anyone handling money wears red braces, big sunglasses, and blue-and-white striped shirts. Concordantly, Sonny Crockett, Mr. T, Maverick, and the other televisual and film heroes of the period are draped in, if not fashion, jewellry, or sex appeal, then at least something; at least draped in something. Those muted, cerebral protagonists of the ‘70s New Hollywood, like The French Connection’s “Popeye” Doyle and The Godfather’s Michael Corleone, are replaced in the ‘80s by Rambo, Indiana Jones, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, men whose strengths are recognisable and simple. Power suits succeed blazers. Perms replace partings. And instead of silence, you listen to your Walkman.

“Every day it encroaches. Paititi will not survive its invasion. Everything we are will be taken or destroyed.” It’s not a line of dialogue I expected from a Tomb Raider game. But deep into the narrative of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it’s a position passionately argued by one of the main characters. They’re talking about the outside world. About colonialism.

And, though this character never says it directly, they’re talking about Lara Croft.

In the original Half-Life we never hear Freeman speak but he still interacts with people, even if those interactions mostly consist of him being talked at or tapping the use key to toggle between “follow me” and “stop following me” when he meets friendly scientists and security guards. And for the purposes of Half-Life’s story, this is enough. I griped about it at the time, but not too loudly: we’re clearly not meant to think that Freeman is literally mute. It’s a narrative conceit, hypothetically allowing the player to put their own words in Freeman’s flat textured mouth.

Released in 1987 for the MSX2 home computer in Japan, Metal Gear helped lay the groundwork for the stealth genre. It created one of the most iconic video game protagonists and launched the career of one of the most fanatically acclaimed video game auteurs, Hideo Kojima. The Metal Gear series has become a fixture across console generations. Looking back at the game that started it all reveals something less glamorous. It is formative and also tragic.

This is strikingly similar to what it’s like to live with mental illness. Games such as Hellblade or Night in the Woods deal with themes of psychosis and depression, but I feel The Witcher 3 gives a much more rounded and realistic picture of what it’s really like to live with mental illness.

In the manual for Elder Scrolls 2, Bethesda encouraged players to avoid reloading a save game after making mistakes. So why should gamers follow this advice, and how can designers help them play past their screw ups?

The Making of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past the 16-bit smash-hit for the Super Nintendo. In this episode we briefly explore the start of the franchise and R&D4 the famed division let by Miyamoto. It was during this period that industry legends like Takashi Tezuka (director and game design) and Koji Kondo (music) Kensuke Tanabe (Scenario Writer) joined Nintendo. We further dive into the 3 year long development cycle of this legendary Zelda game.

It’s been 20 years this week since the release of the original, groundbreaking Metal Gear Solid, and to celebrate a fan has taken the 1998 game’s intro movie and completely remade it in Unreal Engine 4.